KAYTUS collaborates with a South Korea-based renowned Multinational Company to develop customized server BIOS

KAYTUS ensures Collaborative Design, Agile Development, and Rapid Delivery for the development of  Personalized Server BIOS Software Customization.

Customer Introduction

The customer is one of the prominent and largest enterprise groups in South Korea. It has hundreds of branches with large numbers of employees, which are distributed around the world. It comprises a wide range of business areas such as electronics, finance, machinery, chemistry, and many other fields.

Project Background

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and AI technology, application scenarios and product customization have become mainstream. New business models, state-of-the-art software applications, and advanced management tools are constantly emerging. The requirements of the customers are becoming increasingly diverse while the customer response time is getting faster. Therefore, "Fast" has become a fundamental demand for the client. It is a basic expectation of the customer to the server manufacturers to provide them with fast, efficient, and accurate server management software of BIOS development services to improve their experience in BIOS customization where it is inevitable to ensure rapid development and delivery. The customer requires that the development of server BIOS should be able to adapt to the current situation of personalized, customized development, and mass supply. It is necessary to develop the required customized BIOS products in an extremely short time and minimum cost.

Business Needs/Challenges (User Pain Points)

1. With the continuous improvement of processor performance and software ecology, the demand for firmware products in customers' critical application information infrastructure is continuously increasing, while the demand for customized firmware in customers' server devices will raise at the same pace.

2. The innovative development of the information technology industry has put new demands on equipment control and security management. Customers desire that the customized BIOS can adapt to the new generation Intel processor platform, ensuring its long-term use and reducing secondary development costs for platform switching.

3. BIOS firmware plays a significant role in the entire computing equipment industry chain. The customer hopes that based on the hardware status of their existing machine, the manufacturer needs to adjust firmware parameters to avoid modifying hardware, optimize machine performance, shorten research and development testing cycles, and help them quickly put customized BIOS products into the testing phase.

KAYTUS Solution

By extensively exploring the customer needs and research and development capabilities, KAYTUS has successfully developed three solutions: hardware platform adaptive framework, scalable configuration interface, and BIOS feature extension package. It has built a new generation of BIOS software architecture that significantly reduces the BIOS open testing cycle of the product and can quickly meet customers' large-scale customized BIOS product demands. It perfectly solves three major challenges in the process of implementing unified mirroring in BIOS development: first, how to dynamically adapt to different server products; second, how to reduce the customization time of products; and third is how to improve the product development iteration speed.

To satisfy the demand of dynamic adaption of different server products and achieve a unified mirroring, KAYTUS found that it is inevitable to establish a hardware platform adaptation framework. Firstly, the hardware design related to BIOS needs to be further standardized to form unified hardware constraints. Then, a product configuration module area is preset in the BIOS image to load the product configuration package for the entire product line, making the BIOS software version completely decoupled from the hardware model product, thereby improving the adaptability of the BIOS software product.  The establishment of a hardware platform adaptive framework completely abandons the traditional method of compiling and releasing versions separately for each product, greatly improving development efficiency.

In the context of reducing the customization time of products, a universal version of fixed settings is difficult to meet all customer needs, so a scalable configuration interface is needed to meet customer customization requirements. Product customization involves inputting customization requirements through customized configuration tools. The feature values in the customized configuration area can be flexibly adapted without the need for software compilation to generate customized versions with one click, reducing the workload of secondary development and improving the delivery speed of BIOS software products.

In terms of improving product development iteration speed, the KAYTUS R&D  team directly connects with the customer's firmware technical team, is close to the customer's operation and maintenance frontline, fully understands customer needs, and can quickly transplant the solidified BIOS feature package to the new platform software package once the customer has  new product requirements. With only a few module embeddings, debugging, and optimization upgrades, the required functions can be achieved, which not only improves the iteration speed of BIOS software products but also ensures the quality of development.

Customer Benefits

Targeting the future procurement requirements of customers for KAYTUS' entire product line. The new generation BIOS software architecture is being applied in the research and development for KAYTUS V2 overall server products. During the development phase, all functions need to be developed only once where product synchronization is not necessary, ensuring the quality of the development and delivery process, immensely improving development efficiency, and forming multiple KAYTUS independent feature modules to support various core technologies such as customized performance and power consumption strategies, intelligent fault diagnosis, firmware security, and startup function customization for customer scenarios. In the testing phase, different products in each iteration cycle only need to perform repeated testing on the relevant functions of the hardware configuration, which only accounts for 15% of the total functional testing. Other common functions improve testing efficiency by conducting cross-testing on different products. In the production stage, product customization is achieved by combining customized configuration tools with image output versions, which can be compatible with all products and enhance the efficiency of customized version release. Based on the new generation BIOS software architecture, KAYTUS has shortened the BIOS R&D and testing cycle of customized server products for customers by 55%, resulting in a delivery efficiency improvement of more than twofold.  After customers put in the use of customized BIOS, it has gained a 15% improvement in memory-related application scenario testing performance and greatly exceeded customer expectations, enhancing customers' trust in KAYTUS and laying a solid foundation for their continued cooperation in the future.